You’d need a shard of ice in your heart not to be charmed even just a little by this eccentric Irish-language comedy: a warm-hearted tale about a woman who believes that a stray dog is the reincarnation of her dead husband. It’s a family film, though I suspect teenagers – and the smutty-minded (I confess to being one of them) – will smirk at the one-woman-and-her-dog bedroom scenes.
Bríd Ní Neachtain plays Róise: a widow who, two years on from the death of her husband, is still struggling to get out of bed each morning. Then, one day, a lurcher-terrier cross (fine mutt acting by Barley the dog) turns up on her doorstep. He seems to know things about her late husband, Frank: his favourite chair, the route of his morning walk. A vet puts the dog’s age at two. Aha! Frank has been dead for two years. So, she calls the dog Frank, feeds it steak and starts wearing makeup again.
As with all the characters, there is not much going on with Róise; at times she comes off as plain daft. And this is a film with the easy, uncomplicated feel of an after-school telly show – particularly when Frank, like a supernatural Lassie, begins to help people around the village.
Like I say, I giggled pruriently whenever Róise is shown in bed with Frank the dog next to her, though he lies chastely on top of the covers. That said, in the end, creepily, the script does actually go there itself, when Frank peeks at Róise in a towel as she gets out of the shower. It’s an iffy scene, though perhaps not quite as iffy as Nicole Kidman sharing a bath with the 10-year-old boy she believes is her husband in Birth. Perhaps more controversially, for a film in the Irish language, the movie’s real star, Barley the dog, is English.
• Róise & Frank is released on 13 September in cinemas.
